Mix flour and
water into mixture. At this point it should be bubbling and starting to smell
pleasant. You can now store it in the fridge and feed it every 4-5 days with 40
grams of flour and 3 tablespoons of water.

A blurry photo of just-stirred starter

I didn’t
actually use my starter until day 14 or 15. When you are going to use it, take
it out of the fridge and bring it to room temperature.

D-day (or B-for-baking-day, or BB-day – bread baking day)

§160 grams
of the starter

§50
grams of whole wheat flour

§150 grams
of bread flour (Soubry white bread flour)

§120 ml water

Mix all of these together with a dough hook and cover with cling film.

Just-mixed starter + part 1 of the ingredients

Leave
it to rest in a warm place for about four hours. Then it will look like this:

Starter + part 1 of the ingredients, just after proving

Then
add the remaining ingredients:

§100 grams
of whole-wheat flour

§300 grams
of bread flour

§2¼
teaspoons sea salt

§300 ml
water

Using the dough hook on your mixer, knead for about 10 minutes
or until mixture is smooth and pulls away from the bowl slightly. It will still
beverysticky though. Let it rest for one hour.

After one hour, knead it lightly, folding it over onto itself a
few times. If you have abannetone (that’s the fancy bread proving basket), spray it
with non stick spray and flour very heavily, all the way to the top. I put it directly into a well-floured cake tin.

Let it rest
another 3 to 5 hours. It will double in size. Once it is almost ready, preheat
the oven to 220°. If you didn’t put your dough directly into the end cooking
vessel, take the dough and flip it onto a sheet pan lined with baking paper.

Using a sharp
knife, lightly score the bread in about three spots. Just use a quick movement
to cut the dough about 1cm. This will allow the bread to bake evenly and will
make it look nice. However, your dough may be too sticky and this will not
work. Don’t worry if it doesn’t. Mine didn’t work.

Put the dough
in oven and lower temperature to 200°. Bake for about 40 minutes or until bread
is golden (according to the recipe - I left mine in for an hour and 20 minutes; I think there is a problem with the temperature gauge in my oven).

Baked sourdough bread

Once its
cooked, let it cool before tucking in.

The cut-into sourdough

Verdict: this is my second time making sourdough, and frankly, it'll be my last. It's not worth the effort, and I'm not happy with the results. I like experimenting with recipes to find which ones give the best results, but I'm calling it a day with sourdough. I found that despite the long cooking time, the dough was still quite damp and thick (the above photo does not do it justice). It tastes ok, but it's just very heavy. And it's just extremely high-maintenance, between the regular feeding and the all-day kneading/rising/shaping/proving process. There is room for only one diva in my house.

For your
leftover starter, keep it in the Tupperware and feed it every week. Mine is looking for a new home.

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Hello! I'm Katie, and I've been living in Belgium for about ten years. Belgian food is delicious, but sometimes you just need something that reminds you of home. Finding this can pose a problem in Belgium, so I often make this from scratch. I don't grow our own or milk cows or anything like that, but I do cook with food that my grandmother would recognise.
I also love Asian and Indian food and I often make this too (it’s the only way to guarantee you get the spiciness you need!). I try to cook low-fat, although some things I just refuse to meddle with (such as sticky toffee pudding). I'll be blogging about my kitchen (mis)adventures here.

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